Evolution / by Patrick Geddes and J. Arthur Thomson.

  • Patrick Geddes
Date:
[1911?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Evolution / by Patrick Geddes and J. Arthur Thomson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    245/264 page 241
    —as scientists we thought, as leisure class we now see; and essentially urban at that. For while in our town herbaria we distinguish grasses and orchids essentially by their post¬ mortem structure, the gardener is the fuller scientist, the true physiologist, knowing their differences as lives; the grass so vegetative that cattle and farm and city all live upon its surplus, the orchids so splendidly floral that we may easily spend upon their culture more than our grass-field can earn. If this rustic point of view be seized, and the urban and mechanical one correspondingly subordinated, the present theory will work itself out just as fully and freshly as did the selectionist game of thought: if not, it remains useless to argue for it. The eye sees only what it brings the means of seeing. Re-interpretation of the Animal King¬ dom.—Instead then of opening new botanical sections, of which each would really require a chapter, sometimes a whole volume, now dealing with the interpretations of flowers and of fruits, and again with the great pecu¬ liarities of habit—evergreens, thorny plants, climbers and so on, let us rather ask: Can any such physiological interpretations be applied to a survey of the animal kingdom ? Its problems are obviously far more intricate
    digitised image 1
    digitised image 2
    digitised image 3